*BSD News Article 26663


Return to BSD News archive

Newsgroups: comp.os.386bsd.questions
Path: sserve!newshost.anu.edu.au!munnari.oz.au!news.Hawaii.Edu!ames!decwrl!nic.hookup.net!news.moneng.mei.com!howland.reston.ans.net!vixen.cso.uiuc.edu!uchinews!milo.mcs.anl.gov!xray!winans
From: winans@xray.aps.anl.gov (John R. Winans)
Subject: Re: Printing graphics on HP LJ+?
Message-ID: <CKCKJn.11H@mcs.anl.gov>
Sender: usenet@mcs.anl.gov
Organization: Argonne National Laboratory, Chicago Illinois
References: <CK9BHn.4o8@rucs2.sunlab.cs.runet.edu>
Date: Fri, 28 Jan 1994 16:02:10 GMT
Lines: 41

In article <CK9BHn.4o8@rucs2.sunlab.cs.runet.edu> bcolbert@rucs2.sunlab.cs.runet.edu (Brad Colbert) writes:
>   Hi again,
>
>      Has anyone had luck in printing graphics on an HP LaserJet +?

Never tried.

>      I was wondering if it was a Ghostscript problem?  Has anyone gotten
>      Ghostscript to print to their HP LaserJet+ or LaserJet II?

I have a LaserJet IIP and was able to get the gs that is distributed on 
prep.ai.mit.edu to build and run fine.  The only problems I had were that the
'gs' shell scripts that it installs to generate laserjet output did not
work properly.  They would list the postscript SOURCE out as text when I ran 
it.  If you read the docs for the 'gs' command itself, you will see that these
shells take all the command line args, place them in a file and then tell gs
to read the file for its args.  That seemed to confuse it because the "%!PS"
line was not at the top or some such thing.

What I did was to rewrite the shell such that it just puts the command line 
args from the shell on the "gs" command straight without the file junk.  That
has the problem of confusing 'gs' if you ever specify anything other than
a file as an operand to the gs shell script.  But it works... and I don't
really have time to determine and/or fix the real problem.

After all that messing around, I could print off any of the postscript demo
files that came with gs as well as print the output from a2ps, and groff.


As an aside, if you are using NETBSD (dunno about the others) have a gander
at your kernal's config file and see which printer ports are configured to use
interrupts... then hook your printer to one that does.  You will see a better
than 20x speedup and a GIANT reduction in CPU load while transfering data to
your printer.

--John
-- 
! John Winans                     Advanced Photon Source  (Controls)    !
! winans@phebos.aps.anl.gov       Argonne National Laboratory, Illinois !
!                                                                       !
!"The large print giveth, and the small print taketh away." - Tom Waits !